Unfinished Business
by Chess
Summary: I'm haunting you," Sirius says, and his mouth twists, smirking and bitter. Set during HBP. Tonks/Remus and Sirius/Remus.


It's been a week since she tried to kiss Remus for the first time. Now, Tonks is sitting in the kitchen of her own little apartment and wondering where exactly she went wrong. He pushed her away, and she almost understands why. That's not the trouble.

The trouble is that ever since she tried to kiss Remus, someone has been following her. It's just little things, flashes of motion behind her and at the edges of her vision, or sounds where there shouldn't be sounds. She isn't even sure there's a connection between the business with Remus and the growing feeling that she's being watched, but her intuition tells her they might be related. Kissing Remus was such a massive mistake that it seems to have thrown her entire life off.

An ever bigger trouble than the mysterious stalker, of course, is that she doesn't even like boys. Her life is somewhat confusing at the moment. She'd go have a word with Remus about the whole business, but she hates big, emotional conversations, and she suspects he's almost equally terrible at them.

Tonks starts watching herself in mirrors. She usually hates to do this, because the reflection never looks like her, but now she's on the lookout for any sudden movements behind her. After a few days of that, she gets so fed up with the suspense of being watched that she sits down on her kitchen floor and starts to cry.

Crying is something she very rarely resorts to, but she can't throw things. She tried that yesterday, and she broke a cup and two plates. Now, she's crying into her hot tea and trying not to think about it.

After a few deeply unproductive minutes, she looks up, only to find her dead second-cousin floating a few inches off the ground in front of her.

"Wotcher," Sirius says.

Tonks can't help it. She throws her only remaining cup right through him.

He bobs back a few paces, looking almost amused. "Sorry, kid," he says, and she can't help but feel that _kid _is intended to wound, rather than being a term of endearment. Sirius grew cruel and strange in Azkaban, and death does not seem to have improved him.

After taking stock of all this, Tonks doesn't feel entirely unjustified when she says, "Fuck right the hell off, Sirius. You're dead."

"I'm haunting you," Sirius says, and his mouth twists, smirking and bitter.

She shakes her head. "That doesn't make any sense. You died. You fell behind . . ." She clears her throat. Maybe explaining this logically will work, although it's not something she's particularly good at. "Look, you're not a ghost. You don't look like one, and besides, you'd only be haunting the Ministry."

"What a bloody laugh _that _would be," Sirius says, floating backwards a bit. "I can't imagine who'd want to haunt the Ministry. It's all paperwork and politics."

"Am I mad, then?" Tonks asks. She wouldn't doubt it. Everyone's been a bit mad lately, and she's certainly been doing her best to keep up. She thinks back to her bedroom mirror, where she stared for ten minutes at her pale brown hair and ragged, bitten lip.

"Dunno," Sirius says, slightly more amicably. "It runs in the family, after all."

Tonks has heard that a million times, but for some reason it's more worrying coming from Sirius. Then again, these are strange circumstances, and she's prone to worrying when confronted with things she can't explain. "Let's not get off the point," she tells him. "I don't much care how you got here, actually. I'm more worried about why you've been tailing me for a week."

Sirius looks decidedly shifty. "Right, well. I didn't actually expect you'd notice anything. You're sharper than I thought. Maye I should apologize for that, too." He makes a mildly disgusted face.

"You're still dodging the question," she says, wondering if she should go for her wand or at least get up off the floor.

He's silent for a second. Then he says, "You knew about me and Remus, yeah?"

Tonks doesn't quite know how to answer that. She knew that they spent almost all their time together last year. She knows that they slept in the same room. She doesn't know, though, any of the words that go with it. Is it a marriage? Something new, or an old, discarded thing that they picked back up once Sirius turned out not to be evil after all? Remus is terrible at delivering the pertinent information, so maybe she'll have to get it from Sirius. Finally, she says, "Sort of."

Sirius clears his throat, looking for all the world as though he's alive. "Ah. Okay then. Well, we've been together since . . . Well,_ technically _since we were seventeen, I guess." He runs a hand through his too-long hair. "So there's that."

"And _why _are you haunting me?" She's starting to feel a little better and therefore a little angry.

He looks very put-out. "I just said, didn't I?"

Tonks wants to laugh at the absurdity of it all. "You came back from the grave because I stole your boyfriend?"

"You've got to understand!" Sirius waves a hand somewhat violently in her direction. "He was more than that. We'd have been married if it weren't for those bloody laws about, well, you know."

Tonks knows. Marriage between Werewolves and humans has been legal for barely five years, as Remus is fond of reminding her. "I'm sorry," she says softly. "But I can't just back down on this."

Sirius shakes his head. "You don't get it. We were—well, fucking meant to be or something. We were—" He looks vaguely embarrassed. "Well, mates."

Tonks takes in the word and all of its implications. Then she says, a little resentfully, "You didn't even leave him anything in your will."

Sirius's expression clouds. "I didn't think I needed to, Nymphadora."

She cringes a little at the name, and she's sure that was intentional.

"I thought we'd get married, actually," Sirius continues. "You know, once my name got cleared and all. Then he'd have gotten all my stuff anyway. But then I got bloody killed and now it's too late."

She bites her lip again. "I know what he meant to you. And you clearly meant a lot to him, because he's in awful shape, Sirius. But you're dead. And there's no sense him being miserable for the rest of his life." The argument isn't the best, but it's probably the sensible one.

Sirius is silent again, hovering in the still air. Then he says, "Yeah. Yeah, he always was rubbish at moving on. Guess we all were. I s'pose you could look after him, anyway," he adds grudgingly.

"I won't be that," she says. "I won't _heal _him for you." She's got to be firm about something, because her fucking dead cousin isn't going to bully her into anything she doesn't want to do.

He looks supremely frustrated. "Okay. Okay, fine. I can't stop you dating. And I have to go soon, anyway. Back there." A pained look crosses his face, but he shrugs it off. "Anyway. I just wanted to make sure you weren't going to balls it all up, mostly." He shoots her an apologetic smile.

She laughs, appreciating the fact that he's speaking her language now. "I'm not." At least, she hopes to hell she's not. It's not exactly going fantastically so far.

"And you will make sure he's okay, yeah?" He falters. "Not for me, understand, but for you."

"Didn't think you were that selfless," she says. She wants to shove his shoulder or something in a show of good faith, but she knows she'd go right through him.

He laughs. "Maybe death has done me a bit of good. I doubt it, though." He flashes her one last smile. "Just do me a favor and don't tell him about this. Bye, Tonks."

Then, very abruptly, he flickers one and disappears.

Tonks gets to her feet slowly and a little shakily. This certainly rates pretty high in the competition for most surreal day ever, even by wizarding standards. She isn't sure if their conversation actually helped her at all, because she wasn't feeling guilty about pursuing Remus, at least not for those reasons.

She sets her jaw. No use sitting around crying anymore, though. She's going to make another cup of tea, put a bit of brandy in it, and then go and have a nice long talk with Remus.


End file.
